As a matter of fact, there was a copywriter living in Professor Solanka’s building. He wore red suspenders and Hathaway shirts and even smoked a pipe. He had introduced himself that very afternoon by the mailboxes in the vestibule, holding a set of rolled-up layouts. (What was it about Solanka’s solitude, the professor silently asked himself, that apparently obliged his neighbors to disturb it?) “Mark Skywalker, from the planet Tatooine.”
Whatever, as Perry Pincus would have said. Solanka was uninterested in this bow-tied, bespectacled, markedly un-Jedi-knight-like young man, and as a former science-fiction buff despised the lowbrow space opera of the Star Wars cycle. But he had already learned not to argue with self-invention in NewYork. He had learned, also, when giving his own name to omit the “Professor.” Learning annoyed people, and formality was a form of pulling rank. This was the country of the diminutive. Even the stores and eating places got friendly fast. Right around the corner he could find Andy’s, Bennie’s, Josie’s, Gabrielas, Vinnie’s, Freddie & Pepper’s. The country of reserve, of the understatement and the unsaid, he had left behind, and a good thing too, on the whole. At Hana’s (medical supplies) you could walk right in and buy a MASTECTOMY BRA. The unsayable was right there in the window in red letters a foot high. So, anyway, “Solly Solanka,” he replied, neutrally, surprising himself by using the disliked nickname; whereupon Skywalker frowned. “Are you a landsman?” Solanka was unfamiliar with the term, and said as much, apologetically. “Oh, then you’re not.” Skywalker nodded. “I thought, because of Solly, maybe. Also, excuse me, something about the nose.” The meaning of the unknown word quickly became clear from context and raised an interesting question, which Solanka refrained from asking: so, they had Jews on Tatooine?
“You’re British, right,” Skywalker went on. (Solanka didn’t get into the postcolonial, migrational niceties.) “Mila told me. Do me a favor. Take a look at these.” Mila was presumably the young empress of the street. Solanka noted without pleasure the euphony of their naming: Mila, Malik. When the young woman discovered this, she would no doubt be unable to resist mentioning it to him. He would be forced to point out the obvious, namely that sounds were not meanings, and this was a mere interlingual echo from which nothing, certainly not a human connection, need follow. The young adman had unrolled the layouts and spread them on the hall table. “I want to get your honest opinion,” Skywalker explained. “It’s a corporate-image campaign. “The layouts showed double-page-spread images of famous city skylines at sunset. Solanka gestured vaguely, not knowing how to respond. “The copy line,” Skywalker prompted. “Is it okay?” All the pictures bore the same heading. THE SUN NEVER SETS ON AMERICAN EXPRESS INTERNATIONAL BANKING CORPORATION. “Good. It’s good,” Solanka said, not knowing if it was in fact good, average, or terrible. Presumably there was always an American Express office open somewhere in the world, so the statement was probably true, though why would it be useful to an individual in, say, London to know that the banks were still open in Los Angeles? All this he kept to himself, and looked, he hoped, judicious and approving. But Skywalker evidently wanted more. As a Britisher,” he probed, “you’re saying the British won’t be insulted?”
This was a genuine puzzlement. “Because of the British empire, I mean. On which the sun never sets. There’s no offense intended. That’s what I want to be sure of. That the line doesn’t come across as an insult to your country’s glorious past.” Professor Solanka felt huge irritation rise up in his breast. He experienced a strong desire to screech at this fellow with the damn-fool alias, to call him names and perhaps actually smack him across the face with an open hand. It took an effort to restrain himself, and in a level voice to reassure earnest young Mark in his David Ogilvy-clone outfit that even the most red-faced colonels in England were unlikely to be upset by his banal formulation. Then he hurried into his apartment, shut the door with his heart pounding, leaned against the wall, closed his eyes, gasped, and shook. Yes, this was the other side of the coin of his new hi-how-you-doin’, up-front, in-your face, MASTECTOMY BRA environment: this new cultural hypersensitivity, this almost pathological fear of giving offense. Okay, he knew that, everybody knew it, that wasn’t the point. The point was, where was all this anger coming from? Why was he being caught off guard, time and again, by surges of rage that almost overwhelmed his will?
He took a cold shower. Then for two hours he lay in his darkened bedroom with both air conditioner and ceiling fan working flat-out to battle the heat and humidity. Controlling his breathing helped, and he also used visualization techniques to relax. He imagined the anger as a physical object, a soft dark throbbing lump, and mentally drew a red triangle around it. Then he slowly made the triangle smaller until the lump disappeared. This worked. His heartbeat returned to normal. He switched on the bedroom television, a whirring and clanking old monster of a set dating from an earlier generation of technology, and watched El Duque on the mound, his amazing, hyperbolic action. The pitcher coiled himself up until his knee almost touched his nose, then unwound like a whip. Even in this erratic, almost panicky season in the Bronx, Hernandez inspired calm.
Professor Solanka made the mistake of flipping briefly to CNN, where it was all Elian, all the time. Professor Solanka was nauseated by people’s eternal need for totems. A little boy had been rescued from a rubber ring in the sea, his mother drowned, and at once the religious hysteria had begun. The dead mother became almost a Marian figure and there were posters reading ELIAN, SAVE US. The cult, born of Miami’s necessary demonology—according to which Castro the devil, Hannibal-the-Cannibal Castro, would eat the boy alive, would tear out his immortal soul and munch it down with a few fava beans and a glass of red wine-instantly developed a priesthood as well. The dreadful media-fixated uncle was anointed pope of Elianismo, and his daughter, poor Marisleysis, with her “nervous exhaustion,” was exactly the type who would, any day now, start witnessing the seven-year-old’s first miracles. There was even a fisherman involved. And of course apostles, spreading the word: the photographer living in Elian’s bedroom, the TV-movie people waving contracts, publishing houses doing likewise, CNN itself and all the other news crews with their uplink dishes and fuzzy mikes. Meanwhile in Cuba, the little boy was being transformed into quite another totem. A dying revolution, a revolution of the old and straggle-bearded, held the child up as proof of its renewed youth. In this version, Elian rising from the waters became an image of the revolution’s immortality: a lie. Fidel, that ancient infidel, made interminable speeches wearing an Elian mask.
And for a long time the father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, stayed in his hometown of Cardenas and said little. He said he wanted his son back, which was perhaps dignified, and perhaps enough. Pondering what he himself might do if his uncles and cousins were to come between him and Asmaan, Professor Solanka snapped a pencil in half. Then he switched channels back to the ball game, but it was too late. El Duque, himself a Cuban refugee, would not be of Solanka’s mind in this. That mind, in which Asmaan Solanka and Elian Gonzalez blurred and joined, was overheating again, pointing out that in his own case no relatives had needed to get between Solanka and his child. He had achieved the rupture without outside assistance. As the helpless rage mounted in him he used, again, his well-practiced techniques of sublimation, and directed the anger outward, at the ideologically deranged Miami mob, transformed by experience into what they hated most. Their flight from bigotry had turned them into bigots. They screamed at journalists, abused politicians who disagreed with them, shook their fists at passing cars. They spoke of the evils of brainwashing, but their own brains were self-evidently unclean. “Not washing but staining,” Solanka found himself actually yelling aloud at the Cuban pitcher on TV. “You people have been brainstained by your lives. And that little boy on a swing with a hundred camera snouts nosing at his confusion: what are you telling him about his dad?”